Yellow shadow ant
The yellow shadow ant is a small yellow ant with a very sneaky trick. Its queen does not build a home by herself. Instead she sneaks into a black ant nest and takes over, and the black ant workers end up raising her babies.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
To get in, the queen first takes on the smell of a black ant, so the nest thinks she belongs there.
Little by little, the whole nest fills up with yellow shadow ants instead of black ants.
Other ants can play the same trick on it and take over its nests.
It looks a lot like the yellow meadow ant, but it looks for food out in the open.
The ants in North America that look like it are now known to be a different kind.
Most asked questions about Yellow shadow ant
?How does the yellow shadow ant start a nest?
Its queen sneaks into a black ant nest and takes the place of the old queen.
?Where does the yellow shadow ant live?
It lives in Europe, Asia and north-west Africa.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Lasius umbratus
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa
- Also known as
- Yellow lawn ant
Where the facts come from
- Lasius umbratus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by This image is created by user Dick Belgers at Waarneming.nl , a source of nature observations in the Netherlands.. CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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